I wanted to resurrect an old Hi-Grade Notino laptop of 1998 vintage, using Linux, but despite a reasonably beefy AMD K-6(2) processor running at nearly 400 MHz. this little machine only has 32 MB of RAM. Puppy wouldn't work well, and I was glad to find DSL, and wanted to do a full HD install. I chose the last stable release, 2008. After booting successfully by CD-ROM, and partitioning using CF-Disk (the little 4 GB drive was only really good for one main partition and a swap partition) I found an HD install script, which ran fine until it left me high and dry at the Lilo install stage, with a non-booting system. I googled extensively, and found lots of people giving up after reaching the same stage. I googled even more and slowly dealt with each new problem but kept on coming against another obstacle, including one "gotcha!" that requires an uber-geek to spot (which thankfully one did mention). Finally I got it working.

Is it worthwhile my doing a tutorial on this, or was there a much better way that I missed, having put in a lot of effort for nothing?

Here are some cursory notes. If it is worthwhile, I might put these into a more informative form.

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You can install DSL to hard drive.﻿ I've done it, but it is not easy. It needed a lot of google detective work.

You have to do the dsl-hdinstall script till it finishes. That leaves you with DSL on the hard drive. You need to mount the hard drive "mount -o dev /dev/hda1" because otherwise lilo won't install (that's a real "gotcha!") Then copy the lilo.conf off the CD onto the hard drive. Before running lilo - you﻿ need to "chroot /mnt/hda1 /bin/bash" so that lilo thinks the root directory is on your hard drive partition, not on the install CD any more.Edit lilo.conf so it works for the new system, run lilo and it works. It will now boot off the HD.

I wanted to resurrect an old Hi-Grade Notino laptop of 1998 vintage, using Linux, but despite a reasonably beefy AMD K-6(2) processor running at nearly 400 MHz. this little machine only has 32 MB of RAM. Puppy wouldn't work well, and I was glad to find DSL, and wanted to do a full HD install. I chose the last stable release, 2008. After booting successfully by CD-ROM, and partitioning using CF-Disk (the little 4 GB drive was only really good for one main partition and a swap partition) I found an HD install script, which ran fine until it left me high and dry at the Lilo install stage, with a non-booting system. I googled extensively, and found lots of people giving up after reaching the same stage. I googled even more and slowly dealt with each new problem but kept on coming against another obstacle, including one "gotcha!" that requires an uber-geek to spot (which thankfully one did mention). Finally I got it working.

Is it worthwhile my doing a tutorial on this, or was there a much better way that I missed, having put in a lot of effort for nothing?

Here are some cursory notes. If it is worthwhile, I might put these into a more informative form.

Quote

You can install DSL to hard drive.﻿ I've done it, but it is not easy. It needed a lot of google detective work.

You have to do the dsl-hdinstall script till it finishes. That leaves you with DSL on the hard drive. You need to mount the hard drive "mount -o dev /dev/hda1" because otherwise lilo won't install (that's a real "gotcha!") Then copy the lilo.conf off the CD onto the hard drive. Before running lilo - you﻿ need to "chroot /mnt/hda1 /bin/bash" so that lilo thinks the root directory is on your hard drive partition, not on the install CD any more.Edit lilo.conf so it works for the new system, run lilo and it works. It will now boot off the HD.

Yes there is a very nice guide on the Wiki - what it doesn't mention is that the script doesn't do the Lilo stuff correctly, so you are left with a full installation on your hard drive, but no way of booting into it. Hence what I wrote above.

I did a lot of searching and found that everybody who had tried a full HDD install had run into the same proble, and most gave up after coming across the "gotchas" such as having to specifically mount the system partition with the "dev" option.

Well dummy me! I recently installed DSL to an old PC with only a 1.2 Gb HD and 64mb RAM, and it works well, but then I noticed that the home directory, plus root, was taking up nearly the entire HD showing completely full except for about 80mb!?!?!?! WT HE double toothpics is that about? I thought DSL on a CD live was only 50mb, so why is my root/home directory taking up nearly 800mb??? I don't get this at all. Shouldn't it have only used up about 50+mb as on the live CD? Am I missing something here? Not comprehending it?**********************************UPDATE: Figured out why DSL "hulked out" seemingly

OK, redid the whole install, decided to go with frugal because I just could not deal with having DSL taking up entire small drive I have (read above). But after attempting the frugal even after I thought I had reformatted my HD, it still said I had no room! So this time I erased the partitions using command line instead of some other live CD tool (like Ultimate Boot CD). *the command line I used was: shred /dev/hda3 (NOTE to newbies similar to me, do NOT forget to add the number of the partition to your hda/sda otherwise you will shred the entire drive! hda1, hda2, sda1, sda2 are PARTITIONS, but only hda or sda are entire DRIVES! )After I erased the partitions via terminal I pulled up cfdisk, deleted the entire HD partition, then reformatted three seperate partitions as per the frugal install Wiki guides "out there" and now VIOLA! Got lots of room and DSL is screamin' fast! Once and awhile I minimize my windows to see how the RAM and Swap are doing; usually the RAM (only 64mb!) is between 25mb and 40mb being used. The Swap seems to hover around 50mb or so (have it set as double my RAM--130).

So get busy you other newbies and enjoy DSL! Also, don't get discouraged as some seem to. If you follow the well written Wiki guides on the frugal or full HD installs you will be fine. If you make a mistake it only takes about 20 minutes to do it again from a fresh install; better to do it RIGHT AWAY rather than weeks later, yes?